THREE EXECUTED AT DAWN IN LEBANON, FIRST EXECUTIONS SINCE 1998

the executions, which were carried out despite pleas for clemency from human rights movements, the European Union and Lebanese politicians, took place at 5:00 am in Rumieh prison northeast of Beirut.
Ahmad Mansur, who killed eight co-workers in a spectacular shooting spree on July 2002, was hanged. Remy Antoine Zaatar, convicted of killing two members of the civil defence and a Syrian army officer in June 2002, and Badih Hamadeh, a Sunni militant who killed three Lebanese soldiers the same summer, were executed by shooting.
Dozens of intellectuals and human rights activists held a sit-in at the Lebanese parliament Friday to protest against the executions.
The demonstration forced Lebanese soldiers, backed by trucks and jeeps, to block access to the pedestrian square near parliament called Place de L´Etoile.
The protestors, many wearing black, then marched to a nearby public area where they lay down for several minutes to simulate death.
Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, called on Lebanese President Emil Lahoud to halt the executions, which France said would be "contrary to the spirit of the association accord signed between the European Union and Lebanon in June 2002."
“Europe’s appeals against the resumption of executions in Lebanon would have been more credible and strong if the EU had presented and worked for the approval of a pro-moratorium resolution at the last session of the UN General Assembly,” Hands Off Cain General Secretary Sergio D’Elia said.
“The EU cannot say ‘no’ to a worldwide moratorium, concerning all the countries that practise the death penalty, and then expect to have it in just one of these, as if executions concern just Lebanon and not other countries, like the US or China. The latter, to mark the upcoming Chinese New Year on January 22, in just two cities Shijiazhuang and Tiayuan, has already carried out 23 executions.”
Capital punishment was rare in Lebanon until a 1994 law effectively renewed the practice. Whereas only three convicts had been hanged in the past 35 years, the law cleared the way for 14 fresh executions.
Execution orders were then stopped when Lahoud first took office in 1998 because then prime minister Salim Hoss was an opponent of the death penalty and refused to sign any such orders.
The French-language daily L´Orient-Le Jour commented Saturday that Lahoud had been inflexible, adding that "deaf to European protests, Beirut maintained that they were particularly odious crimes affecting state security, and that in any case the country is not yet ready for the abolition of the death penalty."
A government statement announced on Friday night that six other prisoners on death row have had their sentences reduced to life in prison with hard labour. The newspaper Al-Mustaqbal, belonging to Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, said the six concerned were four Lebanese, a Syrian and an Egyptian.